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Breeding Contempt Ellen Wilson Fielding The day after Christmas 2002, news stories broke about a crazed French-American sect that claimed to have produced the first cloned human being. Two more such claimed clones were announced shortly thereafter—“virgin births” to Raelian adherents, for whom cloning is ostensibly a recovery of their traditional mode of reproduction, since the sect traces the human race back to visiting space aliens who cloned themselves. At this writing there is no evidence that the story is anything other than a hoax (the Raelians have refused to allow genetic testing of mothers and infants to corroborate their claims). No matter. The post-Christmas announcement of secular tidings of great joy was like the entrance of the fate theme from Carmen, warning us not to depend upon a happy ending. Someday, the first cloned human baby will emerge from a human birth canal and emit a cry so fraught with significance that it will leave no corner of the cosmos silent. The timing of the first false dawn tells it all: mankind wrestling with God to create a different sort of miraculous birth from that remembered nativity in Bethlehem. Mankind, dissatisfied with the brand of salvation bought by Calvary, inaugurating a great project of self-salvation (Operation Boot Strap on a grand scale) that ultimately is aimed at defeating disease and perhaps threatening death itself, or holding it at bay indefinitely. It is the philosophy of the self-help book writ large—self-help on a global scale. The Raelians were likely grabbing some bizarre publicity by means of a strangely motivated hoax, but this only extends the seemingly inevitable deadline projected by the self-creation project. We garner some extra time in an uneasy truce—but to what purpose? What use can we put this time to, since time primarily favors the cloners? The more opportunity they have to talk about cloning humans, the more natural or at least inevitable the idea will begin to appear to increasing numbers of people. The “respectable” scientists’ take on bringing a cloned human being to birth at this stage of research is positively apocalyptic. Their lurid descriptions of genetic defects and freaks among experiments in cloning animals are not only powerful public arguments against doing anything similar with human genetic matter right now, but presumably true as well. Of course, many of these same scientists have no long-term objection to human reproduction by cloning, once all the kinks are worked out. Meanwhile, many research scientists are keenly enthusiastic about “therapeutic” cloning to harvest embryonic stem cells and perform other research on cloned humans who are condemned to be destroyed before they progress beyond very early stages of development. Some scientists may even derive most of their motivation for condemning the Raelians and their kind from fears that well-publicized human cloning tragedies will turn the public against the entire genetic project, however hopefully science ultimately contemplates the medical miracles it will make possible. So the horror story arguments against cloning humans now, however graphic and true, are stopgaps. They point to the willingness of the cloners eventually, when it makes more sense, to trample on human rights and dignity to achieve their end. By alerting us to these underlying intentions, they encourage us to listen skeptically to the rest of what they say. “Responsible” scientists point to a genuine evil outcome of human cloning experiments that many sectors of society can, at least temporarily, unite against. But the unintended production of gravely handicapped babies is not the final ground of pro-life opposition to human cloning. If, as may someday be the case, science works out its developmental difficulties with cloning, those who believe in the sanctity of human life would still oppose it. Why? For at least two reasons. For how it treats the cloned human being, and for what it does to the cloner. Lincoln famously made the case that slavery was objectionable both for what it did to the slave and for what it did to the slaveholder. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a slave owner.” The slave suffered more from the physical conditions of slavery, the potential for ill treatment, the assault to his human dignity, the stunting of his human capacity for making and abiding by free decisions about his destiny, the frustration of his desire to form a stable family. But the slaveholder, by immorally exercising ownership over another human being, malformed (or violated) his own conscience and accustomed his mind to an untrue understanding of the worth and dignity of the human person. He involved himself in a corrupting and morally debasing relationship whose tendency was to distort not only the human psyche under his subjection, but the psyche and soul of the enslaver, by inclining him toward a tyrannical attitude toward fellow human beings. “Sic semper tyrannis,” shouted John Wilkes Booth after firing a bullet into Lincoln’s brain. Booth, like his fellow pro-slavery (or at least “pro-choice”) Southerners, would not admit his own de facto tyranny over enslaved blacks, no matter how disguised this tyranny was in many well-meaning individuals by care for their slaves’ well-being and even personal affection for them. Mary Chesnut, the wife of one of the Confederate leaders, wrote a diary of the war years that provides a keen-eyed view of the diseased center of the Confederate position. Most Southerners were neither slaves nor slaveholders, and some opposed the institution. But those fighting for the right to secede were, in a conflict increasingly defined by slavery, inevitably also fighting to defend slavery. Slavery was a prime example of a “sinful structure”—that over-applied but genuine reality called to our attention in the politicized ’60s. Sinful structures are social, economic, or political arrangements, polities or institutions that make it difficult or impossible to act morally without courting martyrdom or social or economic harm. Living within such a structure inclines one—tempts one—to create intellectual defenses, false ideas of reality that will justify cooperation with the status quo rather than risking the penalties of non-cooperation. For example, in Mary Chesnut’s South Carolina milieu of slave-holding families, decent, Church-going heads of loving families would find self-justifications for parting slave families under their “ownership,” and punishing slaves who attempted to run away. Many of these plantation owners ended up fathering slave children who, even when treated with extreme kindliness and generosity by slave standards, still lived at a great divide from the slave owner’s children by marriage. And no matter how well the slaveholding father might treat his slave children, an heir might sell them off to meet debts or remove unpleasant reminders of a master/slave liaison. Under these circumstances, how great must have been the temptation for the slave owner to deny or argue around the slave’s fundamental human equality as a fellow child of God. How attractive the paternalistic defenses of slavery, based on arguments about natural slave classes and the like. Enmeshment in slave-holding hampered the slaveholder’s (and the slavery defender’s) accurate perception of the created world and its human inhabitants as they really are in relation to God their common father. So the slaveholder’s initial involvement in an immoral situation first inclined him to wrong thinking, which further inclined him to wrong action; after all, it was in the slaveholder’s interest—his financial interest and his interest in sleep unbroken by bad conscience—to believe that the slave was sub-human or at least sub-slaveholder. However, this convenient though untrue belief made him more likely to treat the slave inhumanely, and by so doing immorally. Abortion shows a similar pattern: Convenience collides with a true picture of reality, “reality” gives way, and the abortion mentality thereby set free expresses itself in reduced respect for innocent human life. The nationwide increases in incidents of child abuse and such child-abusive behaviors as indulging in pornography, tolerating open homosexual lifestyles, marriage and adoption, and exposing children at young ages to sexual language and situations are examples of this reduced respect. It is wrong to believe that abortion does not snuff out a human life, or that these particular lives possess no inherent value. It is wrong philosophically and biologically as well as morally—wrong in the sense that an incorrect answer on a math test is marked “wrong.” It does not accord with reality. Those who, through weakness or some form of coercion, submit to abortion but don’t deny or disguise to themselves the reality of what has occurred, are those suffering straightforward cases of post-abortion syndrome. Whenever our understanding of reality differs from reality itself, reality rudely alerts us to the fact. If we attempt to walk on water without divine assistance, we will sink. If we consistently accumulate monthly deficits with no way to pay them, we will face bankruptcy. If we design a bridge using non-Euclidean geometry, it will collapse. If we get behind the wheel after downing a six-pack of Budweiser, our judgment and coordination will be impaired. If we plant carrot seeds under the illusion that they are cucumbers, carrots and not cucumbers will sprout in our garden. Some of these exercises in unreality have a moral component, some do not, but the real world has sharp edges that let us know when we bump up against them. And so we wind back to today’s watershed issue, human cloning. Can creatures successfully grab the role of Creator? Is human life really sacred—not just subjectively, in our own eyes, but really, in the eyes of the God who made both us and the rest of reality? If human life is sacred from conception to natural death, in the pro-lifer’s formulation, what follows? Forgetting for the moment eternal rewards and punishments, what consequences attend ignoring this little bit of reality, either by redefining membership in the human race or by employing a cost-benefit analysis? Two natural consequences follow. The “exterior” consequence is our willingness to treat certain classes of human life as non-sacred, or to treat all human life as potentially non-sacrosanct to the extent that it crosses other social or personal interests, or deteriorates substantially in perceived “quality of life.” For example, people now conceive babies solely to obtain compatible organs or tissue for transplants or medical treatments—not in large numbers, but legally, and surrounded by decreasing controversy. In an English case that recently raised headlines across the Atlantic, a court granted a married couple permission to pursue fertility procedures to conceive a child for the therapeutic benefit of their already existing child, afflicted with a rare and debilitating blood condition. The child brought into existence for, presumably, his own sake was going to be medically served by the sibling conceived solely for that contingency. The interesting thing is that we here in America showcased similar articles and commentary on this issue several years ago, when a home-grown example first came to public notice. I have not observed recent U.S. stories on this procedure, however. It is no longer shocking, alarming, or sufficiently disquieting to sufficient numbers to produce front-page newsprint. So what does this say about the original grounds of disagreement or disquiet? Probably, that most people reacted viscerally to it as unprecedented and as the stuff of Frankensteinian sci-fi movies. If public shock had reflected outrage at the exploitative use of human life, especially by those—the parents—who should most value and protect it, then why would it have dissipated relatively promptly and without cogent philosophical arguments about why it was all right to conceive human life as a means to prolong or enlarge someone else’s life or health? Over and over again in these human life controversies–legalized abortion, frozen fertilized eggs, in vitro fertilization, fetal tissue research, euthanasia, denial of necessary medical treatment for the handicapped, cloning—outrage and opposition are not worn down by moral and logical argument, but by sheer familiarity, which breeds increasing contempt of human life—other people’s human lives—as objects innately worthy of protection from abuse, misuse and manipulation. A consensus might have arisen at a critical moment that abortion—or fetal research, or disposing of fertilized eggs, or cloning—is wrong because human beings possess an innate dignity that always and everywhere makes wrong the cavalier disregard of individual lives and well-being in pursuit of other people’s ends. If such a consensus had crystallized, proponents would not have been permitted to go forward with these “advances,” at least until they had argued away or morally corrupted the consensus. Instead, they merely repeated what they wanted and why, like a demanding child showing greater endurance than his parent, until the outrageous no longer outraged. It had become the familiar. The process is similar to the contemporaneous coarsening of language used in public and private, in movies and on TV; to the proliferation of off-color jokes and explicit sexual references, even in prime-time venues, to the toleration of public displays of homosexual affection and newspaper announcements of homosexual unions. In none of these instances was the public persuaded by rational debate that their earlier more restrictive or “judgmental” preferences were wrong or misguided; these preferences simply wore away, like water wearing away stone, under repeated exposure to what initially shocked and outraged. In some ways abortion may seem an exception to this process. As several authors, reflecting on the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, pointed out in the previous issue of this Review, polls show growing numbers of Americans in general and young Americans in particular opposing most abortions, and abortion numbers in this country began declining a few years ago—not nearly enough, but significantly—from about 1.6 million performed per year to about 1.3 million. And in the past year, with Bush in the White House and a slightly Republican Congress, several pro-life initiatives have made it through Congress or appear to have a good chance of doing so. Bush has also thus far held the line on permitting human cloning. All this is a tribute to the resiliency of natural law and its resistance to complete extinction by the arguments of situation ethics and the powerful pull of sheer self-absorption. Hopeful indicators such as these poll statistics are welcome grounds for renewed optimism and rededication to the pro-life effort as America enters its fourth decade of legalized abortion on demand. However, several less positive observations need to be made in order to understand how difficult it is likely to be to oppose people on issues that, like cloning, apparently interfere with promised progress. For on scientific research involving the use of newly conceived human lives, the Dr. Frankensteins have unfortunately positioned themselves as “pro-lifers” of a sort. Of course, they mean pro-life in a sense that the unborn and their advocates would not be able to appreciate. The lives they are “pro” are those belonging to the already born but ailing or, like Christopher Reeve, the handicapped. That in itself would not pose a moral problem, but those lives have been set in competition with those of the unborn. Those engaging in such research or convinced that they or their loved ones stand to gain from it establish a hierarchical “right to life” that permits them to dump experimental or “therapeutic” conceived human life in good conscience. After all, the experimental humans die in a good cause, and why should we not direct our actions based on a cost-benefit analysis of the good versus harm they do? One objection—that of the sanctity of human life—we already know the cloners do not acknowledge, or at least they do not understand it as we do, as something that might keep us from doing what we want to do. Another objection also derives from our finite, creaturely status, and that is our inability to truly judge, looking at the big picture and broad expanses of space and time, what is best in the long run. Of course, we have to make many such prudential judgments daily, to the best of our limited ability and knowing that we are likely to make some mistakes. We make business decisions like that, and professional decisions, and personal decisions about things like marriage and children. The difference between the Dr. Frankensteins who make such decisions, and those of us who admit the limitations of our creaturely status, is that we self-acknowledged creatures know we lack sufficient wisdom to confidently sacrifice means to ends in the assurance that using those often morally murky means will get us to those ends and avoid entangling us in more perilous unanticipated evils. Even if we possessed sufficient power or virtue, we would still lack the necessary perspective to take on the role of Divine Providence. We cannot remove ourselves far enough outside space and time and finite existence to view our world from, well, God’s perspective, in which all of the interweavings of human acts, their long-term and short-term and unanticipated and anticipated consequences, stand revealed. This doesn’t mean we freeze, paralyzed, and refuse to act at all, but if we are realistically modest in our self-assessment as creatures, we gratefully clutch any absolutes the natural law places in our hands to assure us that in a given case we are doing the right thing. Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey tells the story of a friar who attempts to comprehend God’s reasons for “causing” the death of a small group of unrelated people who happen to be crossing a bridge when it collapses. There are times when all of us think we know why—for what good end—God acted or permitted others to act in this or that human event. But only the mad—the kind of people who suffer delusions of grandeur—think they always know why this or that event happened, or what would be the best future outcome, and how it could best be brought about. Most of us do not lay claim to that degree of foreknowledge, but detached from moral absolutes, more and more of us drift into determining what seems the best outcome by thought processes that are either utilitarian (the greatest good for the greatest number, “the bottom line”) or simply selfish. Many sufferers from Parkinson’s or their friends and relatives, for example, understandably but selfishly brush aside the interests of the unborn who might mitigate that suffering or reverse that decline in neural function. The projected good outcome justifies the moral compromise necessary to achieve it. So, despite cautiously—oh, so cautiously—optimistic news on the abortion front, the news is very bleak on the frontiers of science, where complexities of thought confuse the issue and repeated exposure softens the sense of strangeness originally aroused by concepts like designer babies. And even legalized abortion faces no full-scale threats to its continued existence. The hoped-for pro-life successes are at the margins, in areas like partial-birth abortion, parental consent, public funding, and the like. In fact, a United States of America in which abortion was once again illegal—even if banned in only two-thirds or three-fourths of the states—would now seem almost as “shocking” to the imagination as the post-Roe world looked to those waking up on January 23, 1973. Yes, Americans were shocked several years ago to learn that partial-birth abortions were taking place in this country, and they politically supported the bills that attempted to ban the procedure. They still do. However, even that truly gruesome form of executing the almost born is now familiar enough, un-upsetting enough, to allow the overwhelming majority of the population to go about their daily business without so much as a pained moment’s thought for that day’s victims. So the effects of this Frankensteinian choice to take charge of our human destiny are, externally, to greatly strengthen society’s willingness to treat other human beings well or poorly depending upon the extent to which they are in our way (and to determine which groups of human beings we classify as such depending upon our perceived need to use or lose them). Internally, the effect is to further weaken or deaden our capacity to recognize binding, objective, universal duties toward others, based upon their dignity as fellow creatures destined by their Creator for a life, a death, an afterlife that we have no right to fix or pronounce upon for our own purposes. Related to this second, interior effect is the “mad scientist” self-delusion that we too can be creators, authoring creatures whose destinies may rightly lie under our control. Perhaps above all such issues that have yet challenged the conscience of the human race, cloning encourages what we might call ontological self-delusion. It seems to distinguish two classes of human beings—those created the old-fashioned way, and those confected by us and therefore, presumably, for us. If we bring them into being, aren’t they, in a special sense, here on sufferance, until and as long as they prove helpful or convenient? Interestingly, those who identify themselves with the creator class often avoid looking squarely at the question of their own usefulness to a Creator. Those seeking research grants in human genetics or secular journalists pushing Utopian agendas seek to put distance between the human race and the extended finger of the Creator. One of the primary psychological strengths of the secular versions of evolutionary theory lies in the relative freedom from divine interference that comes when you interpolate aeons’ worth of generations between the earliest life forms and Michelangelo’s depiction of the enkindling touch of the Creator in the Sistine Chapel. Modern man desires to expand the small significant space separating the groping hands of Adam and God cosmically across untold ages in the history of a (perhaps eternal) universe. For secular intellectuals, it’s the equivalent of running away from home. “Deny thy father and refuse thy name.” Acknowledging God’s Fatherhood creates both First and Fourth Commandment duties; a secularized evolutionary flight from the primordial ooze extenuates the father-child relationship into something slight enough for safety from moral oversight or judgment. This way of thinking—and the related “right to choose” way of thinking, and the “let’s not call them humans” way of thinking, and the “some must die that others might live” way of thinking, and all the rest of those mental tricks and evasions, are exercises in what Malcolm Muggeridge, following William Blake, termed “fantasy.” They are escapes from reality. They carry with them the common penalty of all forms of mis-seeing and miscalculating reality—the hard knocks we receive when we bump into the sharp unanticipated edges of reality. Which renders the moral landscape of today’s mad scientists—and their familiarized followers—a true breeding ground for disaster. Published by:
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